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Unconscious Agents

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 24, 1907

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 84, No. 43.

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Unconscious Agents

By W. A. S.

SOMEWHAT more than a hundred years ago, Captain Cook was voyaging in the new world of the South Pacific. His accounts brought to Europe the first knowledge of peoples and customs in Polynesia. Discussing the possibility of teaching Christianity to the natives, he wrote:—
“But it is very unlikely that any measure of this kind [that is, missionary effort] should ever be seriously thought of, as it can neither serve the purpose of public ambition nor private avarice, and without such inducements I may pronounce that it will never be undertaken.”
Little did the explorer understand that the time was at hand when the highest, strongest motive of all, the love of Christ, would send forth missionary after missionary, not only into the South Pacific, but into all the world.
As a matter of fact, it was Captain Cook’s story of discoveries in the South Pacific that stirred up William Carey to begin the definite agitation which grew into the great movement of modern missions.
Captain Cook, who was slain by the wild savages of the South Seas, was moved by commercial and worldly impulses. But there was an overruling Providence using him as an unconscious agent for the furtherance of the great work of missions. Since his day thousands of explorers, inventors, merchants, and students have been influenced to give their lives to the work which now we can see was in the direct providence of God to prepare the way for the gospel message to go quickly to all the world in our time.
What the Lord said of Cyrus might be said of many another: “I girded thee, though thou hast not known me.” Cyrus, a heathen king, was nevertheless the instrument in God’s hand for the accomplishment of his great purposes. It is this ability of the Lord to lay under contribution every force on earth for the carrying forward of his work that gives courage in the face of the great work before us and the little time in which to do it. The Lord commissions his followers to go forth, with the message, under the assurance that all power in heaven and in earth is his. W. A. S.